Category: Healthy eating

Not all of us have time to sit down at your dining table and have a lovely breakfast everyday along with a cup of hot coffee. I do wish I was one of them that could have my morning breakfast while enjoying an awesome scenery of a green back yard or a beach, Unfortunately I have neither of those, so when I get up, I head to the kitchen brew my coffee and make myself some no-brainer breakfast.

Avocado toast is probably one of the easiest breakfast aside from oatmeal. Before I started writing this post we have had the same exact breakfast for almost two weeks. We are writing this post differently as I am going to write down all the ingredients along the way but this post will not have any instructions at all. I thought it would be nice to change it up, also it helps that this is a no-brainer breakfast.

Toast up some bread of your choice, one my favorites currently is whole grain honey wheat from Trader Joe’s. Mash up some avocado in a bowl, I like to season mine with a little salt, pepper, lemon/ lime juice and some chili flakes. You can leave out the chili flakes if you don’t do spicy. We like a little kick in our breakfast to start off our day. Smear the avocado on the toast, top it up with some tomato slices, and a fried egg. Victor likes his egg yolk runny and I like mine fully cooked. If you are like him, just make a sunny side up fried egg. Aside from all the ingredients listed above, you could also add some baby spinach, I didn’t have any on hands, so I left them out. There you have the quick and easy – Avocado toast.

If you think mushing up the avocado is too much work for you, just sliced them up and place them on the toast. I hope this you guys enjoy this as much as we do.

It’s that time of the year where the temperature outside drops tremendously at night. It’s colder than I would like it to but sometimes I still crave for a fresh and refreshing salad. I remembered the time when I was living in California, when family had to go to work and I am alone at home sitting in front of the TV in the summer time, Those were great times, I always stock up the refreshing quinoa salad from Costco. Yes! You heard me right, they weren’t homemade. When I came back to Michigan and I was told that Costco was coming to Michigan and I was like, “Woot woot!”. That’s it, my beloved quinoa salad is on the way.

When Costco showed up here, I did go to the store and stocked up the salad and had it for lunch for a week. When my boyfriend realized that I did that, he told me “Babe, I can make this!!”. I just looked at him like are you kidding me? You can make the salad as good as this? Don’t care, still stuffing my face at that point. He came home the next day with all the ingredient needed for the recipe.

He went into the kitchen and he spent an hour making that salad. Boom! He made it, it tasted delicious, if not, it’s better. He spent a little longer than in the kitchen because we don’t usually have cooked quinoa in the fridge and that was his first time making that salad. I would suggest any of you guys that wanted to try this recipe, that should definitely have some cooked quinoa on hands, that way you do not need to wait for the quinoa to cook and then chill it for the salad. Trust me, keeping cooked quinoa in the fridge makes your life a lot easier. Anyhow, long story short, let’s jump into the recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup of cooked quinoa (follow the instructions on the quinoa bag on how long you need to cook the quinoa)

1 large cucumber (diced)

1 cup of cherry tomatoes (halved)

a bunch of parsley (roughly chopped)

4 stalks of celery (diced)

Kale (*optional, roughly chopped)

Hard boiled egg (*optional)

Lemon juice from half a lemon

1/3 cup of Balsamic Vinegar

1/3 cup of Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Salt and Pepper to taste

Instructions:

Cook your quinoa following the instructions on the bags, let it cool to room temperature and set it in the fridge for later use.

Boil your hard boiled egg in another smaller pot. (I prefer my hard boiled eggs fresh and warm, if you like you could make them in a big batch and keep them in the fridge just like the quinoa.)

In a large bowl combined all your vegetables that have been diced or chopped.

Combined the balsamic vinegar,lemon juice and the extra virgin olive oil to make the vinaigrette dressing in a separate container.

Salt and pepper to taste

*Notice that we separate our dressing and the salad, we like to make this salad in a big batch so that we can have it for a couple days. We do not like to drench my salad with dressing and make the entire salad all soggy. We add in our own dressing when we are ready to eat.

I hope you guys like the recipe as much as we do, I understand this is a refreshing salad that is fantastic for summer, we don’t usually have salad in the winter, but I love my greens. What can I say?

It had been hectic for the past three months, we have been super busy with work, immigration stuff, and of course having surgery and medical appointments are not fun at all. Everything just had been super crazy for the three of us. Today, I finally have time to sit down and realize that I have not been good about posting. It’s exactly like it sounds, when you have so many things going on at the same time, the last thing you will want to do is to sit down at the dining table, pull out your laptop, having a cup of nice tea and start writing again. To be honest, all those things probably sounded pretty good at that time, and they probably crossed my mind, I just told them to wait a little while longer every time they pay me a visit.

After the surgery, I took a couple days off, and since I wasn’t at work, I had some time to myself. While I was scrolling through my photo album, I saw this photo of a bowl of tuna salad. This is one of the easiest tuna salad I have ever made. Of course I can’t take all the credit for this tuna salad, the first time I had this tuna salad was made by a friend of mine that actually doesn’t cook at all (forgive me if I am wrong).

When I first came back to the Midwest after spending sometime at the West Coast my friend and I both would spent time at the coffee shop, followed by movies, and this would always be our dinner. I could definitely eat this dish couple days in a row, it’s super refreshing, especially after a busy day when you do not actually have time to make dinner. This also serves as a great snack, something to tie you over until your morning coffee and breakfast.

Lets moved on to the recipe. I promise you these ingredients will probably already be in your refrigerator. Notice that I do not have the ingredient measured out for this recipe because this is probably the one and only recipe you do not need to measure, you literally just eye-ball everything , place them in a bowl and mix it up.

It might not look like much, it is very refreshing. Of course it reminds me of what a lovely time we had.Mayonnaise and Sriracha are the perfect match for this salad. It’s creamy but not overly, it’s perfect on crackers or pita chips.

Ingredient:

1 can of Starkist Chunck Light Tuna

1 can of Bumble Bee Fancy White Crab Meat

Bell peppers (any color of your choice)

Celery Hearts (Diced)

Carrots (Diced)

Cucumber (Diced)

Serrano pepper

Chili flakes

Sriracha

Mayonnaise

Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

Drained excessive water from the tuna and crab meat, placed them in a large bowl.

Diced all the vegetables, mixed in with the tuna, crab meat and chili flakes. Mix well before you add in the condiments.

Add in Mayonnaise and Sriracha (the amount of Sriracha depends on how spicy you would like it to be, I would start with a two tablespoons.)

Season it with salt and pepper to taste.

Depending on the amount of mayonnaise you use in this recipe, this dish can be pretty healthy if you do not drench the salad with mayonnaise. I hope you guys enjoy this recipe, it is definitely one of the recipes that could bring me back to my happy time.

Winter Solstice is one of my favorite festivals. In fact, I love winter solstice more than I love Chinese New Year, which is very odd for an Asian. Winter solstice is also known as Dong Zhi festival, it is usually around December 22nd.

Traditionally, winter solstice is when all the family members will get together to make food, eating and spending time with each other. It had been a while since I last celebrated winter solstice with my family (more than 8 years to be exact). Glutinous rice balls – Tang Yuan symbolized reunion.

This dish symbolized reunion but I make this dish when I am homesick too. It reminds me of the time of my childhood. We were all so young but whenever my mom decided to make this, we would all drag ourselves out of bed no matter how early it is, we would help my mom roll the glutinous rice dough into these small little balls. Mom will then cook them up and served them as breakfast. Those were some great times.

Ingredients:

Ginger syrup

2 cups of water

6-10 slices of ginger slice (about inch thick)

1/3 cup of brown sugar

Glutinous rice balls

2 1/2 cups of Glutinous rice flour

1 cup of water

Peanut coating

2 cups of toasted peanut with skin removed

1/2 cup of brown sugar

Instructions:

Add in ginger slices and 2 cups of water in a medium pot and bring it to a boil. Once it’s boiling reduce the heat to medium and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Turn off the stove after 20 minutes and let it cool before serving.

Combine the toasted peanut and brown sugar in a food processor or a blender and pulse them. I just pulsed it a couple times to make sure they are well combined, if you over pulsed them it will become a paste. Set the ground peanut aside for later use.

Place the rice flour in a large bowl, slowly add in warm water while stirring to form the dough. Knead the dough by hand after the dough has formed, you are all done when the dough doesn’t stick your hands. Make sure your dough is not too wet, or else it would not hold its shape. The consistency of the dough should be similar to play dough. You could also make the dough ahead of time, place the dough in a zip-lock bag and refrigerate it overnight.

Bring a pot of water to boil for boiling the glutinous rice balls.

Roll the dough into little spherical shape ball in between your palm. The size of the glutinous rice doesn’t really matter as long as they are consistent they will cook evenly.

Drop the rice balls into the pot of boiling water to cook them. Make sure you do not over crowded the pot so that all the rice balls can cook evenly.

As soon as the rice balls are floating in the pot of boiling water, transfer them into a bowl of cold water for about 2 minutes. The purpose of this step is to make sure they stop cooking so that they can maintain the springy texture.

Transfer the cooked rice balls into the cool ginger syrup, and it’s ready to serve

I like to serve the glutinous rice balls with syrup, and the ground peanut in another bowl. Sometimes I do like to add in the ground peanuts into the syrup too. This dish is pretty versatile, you can eat it however you want to. I hope you guys enjoy the dish that I love from my childhood as much as I love making this for you guys.

Summer time, watermelon time, am I right? When it comes to summer, watermelon is a must have for this household. While Victor was doing the grocery shopping this week, he came home with a gigantic watermelon. There is only so much the two of us can eat, so what about the leftover watermelon?

With Fourth of July coming up in the next few days, we all know we can’t have a Fourth of July party without a refreshing pitcher of watermelon smoothie. All of a sudden I have an idea, we can totally have some watermelon smoothie on a warm day like today. The best part about this recipe, it takes two ingredients and a blender with just two minutes to make. Of course, this is not a recipe specifically for the Fourth, but also any hot summer day.

I sliced up some watermelon and frozen kiwi that I have in my freezer, put them in my Ninja Professional Blender (BL610) and hit the power button. Do keep in mind that the slush tastes a lot better with chilled watermelon.

Ingredients:

5 cups of sliced seedless watermelon

1 cup of ice cubes

mint leaves – optional

Instructions:

Combine sliced watermelon and ice cubes in a blender and blend until smooth.

Top it off with some mint leaves if you like the minty fresh taste.

Viola, the whole process takes less than two minutes. You could also add some vodka if you fancy liquor in your smoothie. Let me know if you like the smoothie for a hot summer day.

This Chinese style stuffed pepper is a Chinese dish that is primarily tofu, sometimes we would use vegetable such as eggplant, bitter melon or bell peppers. We would cut them up and filled them with ground meat and fish paste. This is a very common dish that you can find in Malaysia, it’s also a dish that you could whip up in less than 30 minute.

The secret ingredient for this dish is fish paste. Back in Malaysia, my grandmother would usually get up early in the morning to go to the wet market to get fresh mackerel from the fishmonger. She would bring an entire mackerel home and slowly fillet them so that she could turn them into a paste. This is actually a very labor intensive dish back home. Fortunately for us, if you lived in the states, you could substitute fresh fish paste with fish paste emulsion. They usually come in frozen form, you can find them in any Asian store. I personally like to thaw my fish paste emulsion in the fridge overnight before I use it the next day. This recipe requires the fish paste to bind the ground meat before stuffing it in the vegetables or tofu.

This is the brand of fish paste emulsion I like to use for the stuffing.

Other than fish paste emulsion I like to mix in ground chicken breast. My grandmother prefer pork, but I like the taste of chicken much better. In this particular recipe I use ground chicken breast instead of ground pork.

Ingredients:

1 container of fish paste emulsion

1 ground chicken breast ( or ground pork if you prefer)

6 Poblano peppers (We picked this type of pepper because they are milder as compare to Serrano peppers. Of course, another factor is they are bigger than Serrano pepper, you could stuff them easily.

1 stalk of green onion

1 tbsp of ground white pepper

2 tbsp of soy sauce

1 tbsp of sesame oil

Instructions:

Cleaned the peppers and remove all the seeds before making a slit on the peppers for the stuffing. (I like to cut off the top of the peppers for easy stuffing.)

Mix the ground chicken breast and fish paste emulsion in a large bowl. Add in the ground white pepper, soy sauce, sesame oil and green onion into the fish paste mixture and mix well.

Stuff the mixture into the peppers but make sure you do not over stuffed them.

Place the stuffed pepper on the frying pan and sear the outside of the peppers. ( You do not need to cook the stuffing all the way through)

After a good searing, place all the stuffed peppers in a steam-able dish and steam it for 10 minutes. (I generally put 1 tbsp of oyster sauce and 1 tbsp of soy sauce on the peppers before I put it in the steamer.)

Slicing the top off made it a lot easier for stuffing.I had two extra bell peppers on hands, so I decided to throw them in with the rest of the Poblano peppers.

Enjoy this quick and easy Chinese style stuffed peppers. You can either eat them as they are or serve them with rice. I hope you guys enjoyed the food as much as we enjoyed making them.

Let’s talk about crêpes today. What about them? Who doesn’t like a little French pastry for breakfast? I still remember a bunch of friends and I used to head to the mall that was right behind our college to grab these delicious suckers. I don’t know why are they so addictive, or rather how. One thing I do know is, they are super easy to make. Just a couple ingredients and a blender, then we are all set to make breakfast.

Here I have a recipe that is really quick and easy. I like to prepare the batter the night before as you know I am the kind of person that gets really hungry after a good nights sleep. Breakfast is not something that I would skip, it doesn’t matter if I only have 5 minutes, I will still have a slice of toast and my cup of coffee.

In one of the conversation I had with my sister recently she mentioned that she was trying to make a crêpe cake. So this two ways crêpe came across my mind, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I can make these for breakfast and they only take a couple minutes? You could also make these crêpe with a savory twist if you would like. I personally prefer them with jams, nutella or cream cheese.

Based on the tittle of this post, this first set are filled with raspberry jam and ice wine jelly.With this crepe I added cream cheese and banana. You are welcome to add some fresh berries.

Ingredients:

2 large eggs

1 1/4 cup of milk

1 cup of flour

2 1/2 tbsp of sugar in the raw

1 tsp of vanilla extract (you could also substitute with vanilla beans)

3 tablespoon of melted butter

Butter, for coating the pan

Instructions:

Combined all the ingredients in a blender, blend for 20 seconds.

Store the crêpe batter in the refrigerator for an hour or overnight (of course I preferred overnight).

Heat up a small non-stick pan, with some butter, just enough to coat the pan.

Pour a ladder full of batter into the center of the pan, and swirl quickly to make sure the batter spread as evenly as possible to cover the pan.

Cook the crêpe for about 30 seconds before flipping it.

Cook the other side for about 20 seconds and lay it flat on a dish to let it cool before spreading the jam/ cream cheese.

I hope you guys enjoy the crêpe recipe as much as I do. Let me know if you guys have something in mind that you would me to make. I am always open to suggestions.

I have heard a tons of great things about juicing. Juicing is an easier way to get more fruits and vegetables into your diet, but on the other hand, you don’t get a lot of fiber that is in the fruits and vegetables. Juicing machines usually extract the juice and leave behind all the pulp, that being said you left all the fiber behind. In addition to that, juicers can be pretty expensive as compare to a blender.

As I mentioned before, juicers are much more expensive than a bender. I spent about two weeks doing research about juicers and blenders. Knowing me, I ended up with a blender, I got my Ninja Professional Blender (BL610) from Amazon while they were on sale. Now that we have the blender, what kind of smoothie should we make? I saw a bag of frozen antioxidant blend berries that I picked up when we were at Costco two weeks ago.

I also used the same blend for my oatmeal and yogurt.

I decided to try out the blender on Sunday morning. What’s better than starting the day with a vitamin C smoothie and a slice of toast?

This smoothie tasted like something you would get from Jamba Juice or another specialty smoothie spot. This smoothie obviously has a tons of pulp because I don’t want the fiber to go waste, I ended up putting it in my belly.Believe me it tastes much better it looks. I was skeptical at first, but as soon as I try the first sip, all the yumminess, gosh, where have you been all my life?

Ingredients:

1 cup of Sunrise Growers Organic Antioxidant Blend

1 cup of almond milk

1/2 cup of kale

1 Fuji apple

Instructions:

Place all the ingredients in the blender and hit the power button. Blend all the ingredients on high for two minutes.

Viola, another smoothie recipe that can be done in one step. My philosophy is, healthy doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. Sometimes a simple recipe like this could be just what you need to stay healthy.

I have been living in Michigan for almost 8 years, I have also been to Chicago more times than I can count. Recently when my brother visited us in December, we had to drop him off at Chicago airport. This is when we found the Super H-mart, the store is huge, you can find a variety of Asian food with a focus on Korean food in the store, even things that you believe is impossible to find in the United States. I can’t believe I did not know about this place for the longest time. Anyway, long story short, I was really excited about this place, I was like a kid in the candy store.

While we were walking around this store, the was a Korean lady standing by one of the booth handing out samples. I had one of those and I was sold, it was a clear broth with udon and nothing else, it was amazing. I grabbed a couple bottles of the soup base, we have been making a lot more udon these days. Did I mention this recipe take less than 5 minutes? Let’s get into the ingredients and instructions before we go way off topic.

As you can imagine, I have a couple bottles of these soup base in my pantry. The bottle on the left od dried bonito soup base and the bottle on the right is anchovy clear broth soup base. I love both of them equally.

Yum, the dish looks as nice as it taste. I cant get enough of this recipe because it’s so versatile. You could literally put anything you want in the dish, they taste just as nice.

Add 1/2 cup of soup base and 4 cups of water into a small pot. Bring the soup to a boil before adding in the frozen udon noodles.

Turn the heat to medium low before adding the frozen udon noodles into the soup. At the same time, add in the shrimp and the vegetable and cook them for 4 minutes.

Heat up some oil in a small frying pan and make a fried egg like you normally would.

Put the noodles in a bowl and top it off with the fried egg, and the dish is ready to be served.

This recipe doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. As long as you have the soup base and the udon noodles, you may add in any leftovers you have in your refrigerator, and viola, you have your dinner for the night.

One of my new resolutions is to eat healthier. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our lifestyle, sometime we neglect the little things like eating healthier. This year I started with a small goal, I have been telling myself I need to eat healthier and head to the gym more often.

It’s pretty hard to find the motivation to be as active as I would like in this cold weather. Michigan weather changes in minutes, it could be sunny out there this minute but the next will be snowing again. I am going to be honest, I have not been going to the gym as often as I would like but diet-wise, both of us have been pretty good about that. We have been eating pretty clean on a regular basis, but we do have cheat days here and there. I am a firm believer of you are what you eat.

Alright, back to today’s recipe. We are going to talk about my breakfast recipe for the coming week. A couple of my friends been posting photos about what they eat for breakfast. I have been thinking what else could I make that’s super quick and easy. I came up with this chia breakfast bowl idea. This recipe seriously takes no time, but did I mention it looks and tastes awesome. I rolled out of bed and made this breakfast bowl while I was waiting for my coffee. I hope that caught your attention. Enjoy the recipe below!

I used frozen berries because that’s what I have on hand, if you have some fresh fruits you are welcome to substitute the frozen berries with fresh fruits.

My boyfriend used to work in a Thai restaurant, but for some reason he has a soft spot for this Vietnamese Spring rolls. Who doesn’t like a spring roll that is actually made with fresh ingredients. We do not have a lot of farmers market around here in Michigan, but when we do we love to head over there and get some fresh ingredients. You can also get these ingredients in a local supermarket or your local fresh market.

There is one ingredient for the sauce I am not sure where you can get your hands on, my boyfriend actually bought it when he was in Wisconsin. I finished an entire jar of the almond butter from Yumbutter. I love the almond/ peanute butter from Yumbutter, I spread it on my toast, I also included them in some of my cooking. They are just so versatile, and of course they are super yummy too. Hence the name, YUMBUTTER! I will include a link in the ingredients section of where you can get the spicy thai peanut butter with cayenne, tumeric anc cumin. In addition, I also like to dip the spring rolls in a wasabi/soy sauce mixture just to change things up as well as add a kick.

Thes spring rolls are actually pretty filling. The first time I made it I didn’e expect them to be, I made at least 12 of them. Of course, as you can guess there are only two of us.Here is a closer look at the spring roll. Fresh shrimp, lettuce, carrots, cucumber and rice paper.Here is how a rice paper looks like before it was hydrated. All you have to do was rehydrate these puppies in some warm water. They will only take about a minute.

Ingredients:

1 cup of julliened carrots

1 cup of shrimp

1 cup of cucumber slices

A stalk Romaine lettuce

A pack of rice paper

2 tbsp of Spicy thai peanut butter (alternatively you can use regular peanut butter, add some siracha and soy sauce to taste)

1 tbsp of water (if the sauce is too thick for your liking you may use 2 tbsp of water)

A dash of fish sauce

Instructions:

Clean, peel and cook your shrimp in boiling water with some salt for about 3 minutes. Set aside for later use.

Start by rehydrating the rice paper in a bowl of warm of water until soften. You should be able to tell when they are soften you will be able to bend them and use it as a wrapper.

Lay the rice paper flat on a plate or a board of some sort. Arrange your fillings of the spring rolls starting with the lettuce at the bottom. Add a handful of carrots and two slices of cucumber. Lastly, add in your cooked shrimps.

Fold the left and right side of the wrap inward, then tightly roll the rice paper forward, to make sure that all the ingredients stayed in the wrapper.

Repeat with the above steps until you run out of fillings to wrap.

For the sauce, combined the spicy thai peanut butter with water and add a dash of fish sauce. Mixed all the ingredients together and stir well before serving.

I do not feel guilty after eating 6 of these puppies. They taste so good and they are pretty healthy in my opinion, or at the very least better than the deep fried version. Enjoy them on a warm summer day or a cold night.

What’s the quickest and the simpliest dish you think you can make? To me, that would be fried rice, it requires the least amount of ingredients, and the least amount of time. This dish probably took me 10 minutes to throw it all together.

I remember mom used to make fried rice when she doesn’t know what to do with the leftover white rice. Kimchi friend rice is something that I am obsessed with at the moment.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to add the extra egg in the beginning. Obviously I did, as you can see from the second picture.Trust me, it tastes much better than it looks

Ingredients:

1 cup of Kimchi

1 cup of frozen mixed vegetables

2 cups of cooked white rice

2 large eggs

1 tbsp of soy sauce

Instructions:

Chop up the kimchi, make sure you squeeze out the juices from the kimchi.

Combined the juices from the Kimchi and soy sauce, set aside for later use.

Heat oil up in a large frying pan, scramble the egg, and add in the frozen mixed vegetable.

Add in the kimchi with the egg and frozen vegetables until the kimchi is caramelized.

Add in the rice and stir fry with the rest of the ingredients in the frying pan.

Finally, add in the soy sauce and the juices from Kimchi, tossing the fried rice occasionally to make sure the rice is not in clumps.

When the friend rice is done top it up with an over easy egg.

Some of you might think that this dish would be too spicy for little kids. If that’s the case, you could reduced the amount of Kimchi being used.

This is a salad that was inspired by the summer time. When I was still a student in the summertime a couple of friends and I loved to head to Panera and have a light salad for lunch before we buried ourselves in our research again. We would always sit outside of the store, that’s how much we enjoyed the summer. Fuji Apple Chicken salad from Panera is the salad that I always go back to, no matter how many times I keep telling myself I need to try something else the next time I go to Panera.

Now that we are all done with graduate school, and started working in the real world. I finally realized that I can actually gather all the ingredients and make it at home especially after discovering that you can buy the Fuji apple vinaigrette dressing from Target or Meijer. It’s not only a pretty quick and easy salad to put together, it’s also super colorful and light just like the summer time.

All the colors in the dish make it feels like the summer is here.Here is the finish product after I tossed in the dressing, grilled chicken and sesame seed.

Ingredients:

1 cup of regular cabbage (shredded)

1 cup of purple cabbage (shredded)

1 cup of shredded kale

1 large Fuji apple (julienne)

1 large riped mango (diced)

Fuji apple vinaigrette

1/4 cup of sesame seed

Instructions:

Combined both types of cabbages, kale, apple and mango in a big dish.

Season with salt and pepper, drizzle with dressing, toss to coat.

Top it off with grilled chicken and some sesame seed.

Easy three steps for this light summer salad. Anybody can make this dish as long as you have all the ingredients. I guarantee you, after making it at home you will not want to spent 10 dollars for a bowl of salad again. Enjoy the colorful salad, hopefully summer is going to be here very soon.

My boyfriend and I both have full time jobs. We are the kind of couple that like to bring our lunch/ dinner to work if we can, not only does it save money, but we do get tired eating out every day, and what we make at home better caters to our tastes. In addition, there aren’t many food choices in Kalamazoo, unless you are willing to have fast food every single day. To me, there is nothing more comforting than a bowl of steaming hot noodles, especially on a cold day. Since it’s not practical to bring a container full of soup and noodles, I am willing to compromise, I am fine with a bowl of hearty Yakiudon. Yakiudon uses thick udon noodles typically put into a soup but instead is stir fried into this delicious little dish.

Ingredients:

2 eggs

1/2 cup of shrimp, shell and tail removed

1 cup of bean sprouts

2 bricks of frozen udon

1 tablespoon of soy sauce

1 tablespoon of sesame paste

1/2 tablespoon of oyster sauce

1 pack of bonito shaving (optional)

Instructions:

Blanch the frozen udon in a pot of boiling water for a minute to make sure that all the noodles are seperated. Drain, rinse with cold water and set aside for the stir fry.

Combine soy sauce, sesame paste, and oyster sauce with two tablespoons of hot water. Set aside for later use.

Heat up the frying pan with small amount of oil, add the eggs and make sure you scramble it while cooking it. Stir fry the eggs, shrimps and bean sprouts until the shrimps are cooked.

Drained the udon, and add it into the stir fry. Combined all the ingredients together in the frying pan, and add the sauces. Make sure you turn down the heat to medium low, so that you don’t burn the udon noodles.

Season with salt and white pepper to your own taste.

Serve on a plate and add some bonito shaving if you would like.

With a full schedule, this is our version of Yakiudon with a little twist. It’s not something real fancy but it tastes pretty good, and the most important thing is, this recipe is really quick and easy. If I can make this, I am sure all of you can cook this at home.

One of the hearty breakfast that I love especially on the weekends when you actually have more time to prepare food is porridge. Typically, you would make porridge with oats and milk or water, but in this recipe, we are making the asian style porridge which required rice and water or chicken stock. This asian style porridge takes a little longer to cook as compared to the regular oats and milk.

Porridge is usually served as a light meal such as breakfast. This porridge was made from boiling rice in water or chicken stock. The porridge is left simmer in the stock/ water until it becomes a creamy texture. We often have porridge with Chinese cruller, it adds a little crunch to the creaminess of the porridge.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup of diced chicken breast

1/2 cup or white jasmine rice

2 cups of chicken stock or water

2 tbsp of diced fresh ginger

1 peeled century eggs

pinch of salt and ground white pepper

Instructions:

Rinsed the white jasmine rice and while bringing the chicken stock to a boil in a medium pot. ( you will need a big enough pot to hold all the ingredients while not exceeding two thirds of the pot’s volume.)

Once the chicken stock it boiling, uncover the pot, add in the jasmine rice. When the rice and the stock started boiling, turn down the heat to low, add in the diced ginger and chicken breast.

Let the mixture simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring regularly to prevent the ingredients from sticking to the bottom of the pot.

Season with a little salt and ground white pepper before serving.

This is a dish that you should serve it hot, it tastes a lot better when it’s hot. Enjoy your breakfast on a cold Sunday.

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This is a text widget, which allows you to add text or HTML to your sidebar. You can use them to display text, links, images, HTML, or a combination of these. Edit them in the Widget section of the Customizer.